The Kennedy Assassination And The Persistence Of Conspiracy Theories -- Part III
/As mentioned in Part I of this series, I don’t have a firm view on whether there was or was not a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. However, if there was such a conspiracy, then clearly that is something that would be significant, and that all Americans would have a big interest in knowing about.
The reason a conspiracy would be so significant is that its very existence would imply that its members foresaw important consequences from the assassination. If the assassination was just the work of a lone gunman, presumably Oswald, then there need be nothing more to it than the mania of one crazy guy. The lone assassin would not need to have any motive beyond the satisfaction of taking out his target, or perhaps the perceived public glory and notoriety of being recognized as the successful killer. If there is a conspiracy, that completely changes.
In the Kennedy assassination, a problem for conspiracy theorists is coming up with a theory that is plausible. What potential group of conspirators in this circumstance would have had both something that makes sense as the motive for the crime, plus the ability to put together this plot and carry it out? There are not that many possibilities. For today, I will set out the main theories that have been put forth, and apply some preliminary criteria to rate them.
But first, as a basis for triaging the potential theories, consider the issue of motive for a conspiracy, particularly a conspiracy involving at least several state actors:
By contrast to a lone gunman, such a group almost certainly would want the opposite of glory and notoriety, which would entail near certainty of getting caught and punished for the killing. Therefore, such a group inherently will have to be committed from the outset to long-term cover-up of their involvement.
Such a group would also inherently have a well-thought-out concept of what they were trying to accomplish; and the planned accomplishment must be something that makes the huge risks of the conspiracy worthwhile. As a clear corollary, in assassinating Kennedy, it would be evident to rational conspirators that Johnson will become the President. Therefore any viable conspiracy theory must hypothesize that the conspirators have some strong reasons to prefer Johnson over Kennedy as President. They would foresee major changes of policy from the change of Presidents, at least in some area they care about, and the policy changes would have to be such as to justify the assassination in their minds.
With those preliminaries, here are the principal conspiracy theories that I am aware of:
Soviet Union/Cuba. There is plenty of evidence — including Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962 — to support the proposition that Oswald was a Communist sympathizer and supporter of the Soviet Union and of Cuba. Both were the sworn enemies of the United States. This theory hypothesizes that one or both of those entities recruited and supported Oswald to take out Kennedy.
Johnson. The most obvious person who stood to gain immediately from Kennedy’s assassination was Johnson. And there has never been a more desperately ambitious and completely unprincipled man than Johnson to occupy high office in this country. As Vice President, Johnson had access to various security and/or law enforcement personnel of the federal government to assist in the plot. Among the many books hypothesizing Johnson as the leader of the assassination conspiracy is “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ” by Roger Stone (2013).
CIA theory (1) — New Orleans businessmen. This is the theory put forth by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in his 1967 prosecution of businessman Clay Shaw for participating in the alleged plot to kill Kennedy. The theory is that a group of anti-Castro businessmen, with CIA support, recruited and paid Oswald to kill Kennedy. Garrison claimed to have eye-witnesses to the businessmen recruiting and paying Oswald. The motive would be that Kennedy was providing insufficient support to the CIA efforts to take out Castro. The two main New Orleans businessmen accused by Garrison were Shaw and David Ferrie. Ferrie died before he could be arrested. In Garrison’s prosecution, Shaw was acquitted by a jury that deliberated for less than an hour. For a piece that lays out Garrison’s theory sympathetically and in more detail, try this one from the New York Review of Books in 1967 (concluding that Garrison’s case “deserves a fair hearing”).
CIA theory (2) — “The Mob.” This theory differs from the previous one in that the hypothesized participants, besides Oswald and the CIA, were some notorious Italian-American Gambling Entrepreneurs (IGEs) sometimes referred to as “The Mob.” When this theory was first mentioned to me, I thought it was ridiculous — why would the CIA and the IGEs possibly be working with each other? But the theory is less preposterous than it might at first seem. The IGEs had had hugely profitable gambling interests in Cuba, from which they had been ousted when Castro took power in 1960. Now they had large numbers of ex-employees on the ground in Cuba, who could be recruited to work with the CIA on its plans to eliminate Castro. But Kennedy had failed to provide crucial support to the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, bringing about that disaster, and then had backed off on confronting Russia after the Cuban missile crisis. In this hypothesis, members of the CIA also saw Kennedy as failing to provide appropriate support to their efforts in Vietnam.
Thus while it might at first blush seem the least plausible of the theories, it is the last of these — the CIA/Mob theory — that has gotten the most traction over time. Why? Because the others have flaws that probably disqualify them out of the box. For example, the Soviet Union/Cuba theory suffers from the problem that those entities showed little interest in Oswald when he defected. During his time there, the Soviet Union sent Oswald off to an out-of-the-way provincial location (Minsk, now in Belarus) and mostly ignored him. (Could they have smelled a rat — suspecting, or even knowing, that he was a CIA plant?). The Johnson theory has the problem of lack of any direct evidence, plus that none of the major “anomalies” (that I will discuss in following posts) points to him over other theories. The Garrison theory was discredited by the jury verdict, and by allegations of witness tampering.
Of the four contending conspiracy theories, the CIA/Mob theory is the one that offers the best potential explanation for all of the major factual anomalies that make people doubt the “lone gunman” hypothesis. That does not mean that it is correct.
In the next post, I will consider the previously identified “anomalies” in the context of the four potential conspiracy theories.